Letter: Selective memory

Never mind the facts. Robert Strohaver has demonstrated once again the adage that history is a projective psychological test — one tends to see in it what one wants to see.

He blames Bill Clinton for gutting defense and intelligence budgets and in the process totally ignores the fact that the cuts began in the last years of the Reagan administration and were pursued with a vengeance under the first President Bush and his secretary of defense, Dick Cheney. Cuts did continue under Clinton, but during six of his eight years Congress was controlled by Republicans who went along, perhaps perceiving that the military had indeed become bloated.

Strohaver then goes on to argue that the lack of immediate retaliation for the attack on the USS Cole and the Clinton actions in Iraq emboldened terrorists and led to 9/11.

The inconvenient fact that neither the military nor the intelligence agencies knew immediately against whom to retaliate for the USS Cole and the Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings does not seem to matter to Strohaver, nor does the fact that once the perpetrators were identified the United States did go after them and has killed a number of them.

Finally, given the evidence that the Iraq invasion under the second President Bush has proved a great boost for terrorist recruitment, it would seem that had Clinton been more forceful, about all we might have gained would have been an earlier surge in terrorist numbers.

Alan Keller/Naples